Queensland has recorded just one new local case of COVID-19 – a historical case in a child who was in home quarantine while they were infectious.
Some restrictions are set to ease in the state at 4pm on Friday, but masks will remain mandatory.
The new case reported on Friday is the younger sibling of a student at Ironside State School, part of the Indooroopilly cluster which now numbers 145 cases.
The student fell ill first, then the parents and finally the younger sibling.
The younger sibling was proven through serology testing to have had the virus, even though that child returned four negative test results.
Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said that wasn’t an unusual situation in children, and there was no risk as the entire family had isolated and were now fully recovered.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles confirmed defence force personnel will join Queensland police in border patrol efforts from next week.
He said 120 personnel from the army, air force and navy would be helping enforce Queensland’s border closure from Wednesday.
Queensland is only allowing police, health and certain construction workers to cross the border at the southern end of the Gold Coast amid the worsening outbreak in NSW.
From 1am on Saturday only essential workers who have had at least one dose of a vaccine will be allowed to cross.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk had offered to shift border checkpoints to the Tweed River to allow Tweed Heads residents from NSW to cross seamlessly into Queensland, but the NSW government has rejected that offer.
“We tried to keep our border communities together,” Ms Palaszczuk said in a statement provided to AAP on Friday.
“We acknowledge these areas are part of NSW and NSW has introduced a lockdown for the whole of the state. This must be enforced.
“We tried to find a practical solution but unfortunately NSW said ‘no’.”
NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro said on Thursday that moving the border would be a logistical nightmare and would only create problems for NSW communities which rely on Tweed Heads as a service centre.
“If you move that border, that becomes another border for another community. When you start dividing up NSW, you’ll cause more problems than actually solving solutions,” he told reporters.
Mr Barilaro said the government was working with counterparts in Queensland to secure critical supply chains, like food, and to make it easier for essential workers to cross the frontier.
But Defence Minister Peter Dutton said he hoped NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian agreed to move the border south as the NSW residents concerned had “much closer connection to the Gold Coast than they do Sydney”.
He said the current situation meant people could not get to work or get treatment at the Gold Coast Hospital.
AAP
